cyberbotanist:

Most films that incorporate plants use them for setting. It’s unusual to find a movie that actually makes a plant into a plot point. Upstream Color does so in a tangential way. But Ginger Snaps (which btw is an amazing feminist werewolf movie that you should definitely check out if you haven’t seen it) puts a plant at the center of its climax. 

Monkshood, Aconitum sp, is often grown as a garden ornamental. Ginger and Brigitte’s mother has a bouquet of dried flower stems to use in her arrangements. But monkshood is also known as wolf’s bane. It contains toxic alkaloids including aconitine and several related compounds, which are potent enough to kill a human, or a wolf, within an hour or even almost instantly at higher doses. In mythology, wolf’s bane is, along with silver bullets, one of the ways to kill a werewolf.

So when Brigitte’s sister Ginger becomes afflicted with lycanthropy, she and her stoner friend decide to risk the poison’s lethal side effects. They perform an organic extraction to concentrate the alkaloids. It’s a remarkable and refreshing role for a plant to take in a film.